Mary Biddinger, Ph.D.

Biography

Mary Biddinger received an Honors BA in English from The University of Michigan (1996), an MFA in Poetry from Bowling Green State University (1998), and a Ph.D. in English from the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago (2003). She worked as Lecturer of English and Creative Writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago (2003-2005) and joined the faculty of The University of Akron in Fall 2005. She has been awarded the Buchtel College of Arts and Sciences Service Award (2008) and the Chairs’ Award for Outstanding Achievement in Professional and Community Service (2006) at The University of Akron.

Dr. Biddinger teaches courses in literature and creative writing (poetry) and literature courses in British fiction, world literature, and modern and contemporary poetry. She is the author of three full-length collections of poems, Prairie Fever (Steel Toe Books, 2007), O Holy Insurgency (Black Lawrence Press, 2013), and A Sunny Place with Adequate Water (Black Lawrence Press, forthcoming 2014), and one chapbook, Saint Monica (Black Lawrence Press, 2011). Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Bat City Review, Blackbird, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Redivider, and many other journals. Dr. Biddinger has received two Individual Excellence Awards in Poetry from the Ohio Arts Council. She serves as the Editor of the Akron Series in Poetry at the University of Akron Press, where she also founded the Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics, which published its first volume, The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics in 2011. From 2009-2012, Dr. Biddinger served as Director of the NEOMFA: Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in creative writing program.